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10 Indians Twitter Users to Follow

Alagappan — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 05:18:33 +0000

There has been a huge surge in the number of twitter users in India in the recent past. And you might be wondering who to ‘Follow’. We have compiled a list of 10 active twitter users you might like to follow. This list consists of famous Tweeps who are all quite frequent on Twitter and have an healthy interaction with their followers

This list is by no means exhaustive. Of course, you might find a lot of other Indian Twitter accounts which are interesting. We’d love it if you can share a few of such interesting accounts in the comments,

Gul Panag – (@gulpanag) Former Miss India and a well known actress. She is one of India’s most famous twitter celebrity and is prompt in reaching out to her followers.

Mani Karthik – (@ManiKarthik) SEO Expert, Pro Blogger and a regular tweeter. You can find a a lot of updates regarding socail media, seo, blogging and the internet. Though having a huge number of followers, he manages to keep in touch with most of them.

Sudish Kamath – (@suderbuzz) Film Critic for The Hindu. Also a two movie old director. He tweets about a lot about movies and manages to insert humour into most of his tweets.

N Ram - (@nramind) Editor-In-Chief of The Hindu. He shares interesting news articles not just from The Hindu but also various other publications. He also retweets interesting tweets published by others. Links provided by him are very informative and useful.

Shashi Tharoor - (@shashitharoor) An admired Politician and current Minister of State for External Affairs, Govt Of India. He regularly tweets about many of his experiences and also interacts with his followers. It also gives an insight about his personal life and opinions.

Mallika Sherawat - (@mallikaLA)The Bollywood Star is a regular tweeter. She was recently at the Twitter HQ and was the first Asian star to be invited to twitter HQ. Even if she is a bit busy, she makes sure that her tweets are published by her assistants.

Cheth - (@cheth) A designer, social media enthusiast and an avid blogger. He is also into programming. You can get a lot of tweets related to designing and social media from him.

Gaurav Mishra - (@gauravonomics) He is the CEO of a social media research company. He writes and tweets about social media and social change, social media research and strategies.

Gautam Ghosh - (@gautamghosh) A HR Consultant based out of Delhi. Tweets on a variety of topics which include Business and Management. He is also a social media and network junkie and his tweets do reflect that.

Amit Agarwal – (@labnol) Technology Blogger at labnol.org and is considered one of India’s First Professional Bloggers. He is generally the first to post about any new topic. And he uses his tweets to interact with his fans and followers.

You can also the follow me at http://twitter.com/alagappan_nitt.

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Huge Wave of Developers in Google Wave

Alagappan — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 05:27:33 +0000

Google Wave is the ambitious new product to be introduced soon by Google. It is a email-IM hybrid which included google docs and promises to be a great communication and collaboration tool. A brief overview of Google Wave was given at Gethu.com a few weeks back. Recently Google opened up its product for developers and there are huge number of developers lined up to use the service.

It already has around 6000 developers and plans to invite another 20,000 developers by August. Such a huge number of developers for the product would surely result in a wide variety of applications. One example of such an application would be Waves in Wordpress, which would enable you to embed waves in your Wordpress blog.

Google is also eager to try out its new product and plans to release it to 100,000 users by the end of September. It is expected to be an invite-based system much like how Gmail was initially released. And we can hope that by the time this early version is released, it would have a lot of features and would include a rich variety of widgets.

Google Wave Shuts Down Some technology experts were surprised that Google Wave closed...

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The Rise of Facebook in India

Alagappan — Sat, 18 Jul 2009 14:24:10 +0000

Facebook has grown rapidly all over the world last year. It has grown from over 100 Million users to 250 Million users within one year and this huge growth is remarkable. It is continuing to dominate and is indeed very ahead of its competitors Friendster and MySpace.

One of the factors behind this growth is Facebook India. The social networking site has seen a tremendous growth in India. It has nearly tripled its user base in India over the past few months. At the same time there has been a slowdown in the usage of Orkut, India’s largest social networking site.

Facebook plans to release its local language versions in six local languages. This will help close in on the gap between orkut and facebook. Facebook’s success can also be attributed to its cell-phone edge. It is easily accessible through mobile internet. It has also been marketing and publicising itself aggressively in India over the last few months. It had tied up with Aircel in its ads which was telecast throughout the IPL and the World T20. It helped the site establish its presence in India.

The holiday season attracted thousands of students to the site. It helped students to stay connected and discuss things easily. One of the main advantages Facebook has over Orkut is its ability to create group conversations around any status or link of a user. This feature is attractive and keeps groups of friends together. It has also recently announced its Developer Contest exculsively for India in order to create applications suited for the Indian Audience.

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Google Reader – New Changes

Alagappan — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 19:14:40 +0000

Google Reader has been one of the most famous web-based aggregator capable of reading Atom or RSS Feeds. Recently it introduced a few new changes which might radically improve its usage and provide users with new ways of sharing data.

Find and Follow People

This new feature enables you to follow anyone who has chosen to share their items publicly. If you feel that you want to share your items only with friends then you can change the setting in order to disable public sharing. This feature, similar to Twitter, enables you to follow friends, celebrities and people whose items might be useful to you. You can use the new people search feature to find people to follow. You can also preview the shared items, before you choose to follow someone.

‘Like’ Feature

This feature enables you to select items and mark them as ‘like’, similar to the feature already available in Facebook. This can be used a way to show the author or the publisher of a particular post that you like it. All ‘liked’ items are public and anyone reading the item can see that you are a fan of it. The shortcut key ‘L’ enables you to like an item with just a press of a key.

Custom URL for your Shared Page

Google Reader now enables you to have a custom URL displaying your shared items publicly. For example, my shared items can be found here – http://www.google.com/reader/shared/ralagappan2006

Hopefully these features will increase the usage of feeds and Subscription to RSS Feeds. You can follow Gethu.com’s RSS Feeds here : http://feeds.feedburner.com/GethuBlog

Google Wave Shuts Down Some technology experts were surprised that Google Wave closed...

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Facebook India Developer Contest

Alagappan — Sat, 04 Jul 2009 10:13:16 +0000

Facebook has started a contest – ‘Facebook India Developer Contest’, asking Indian Developers to showcase their web development skills by creating applications and other interesting features, both in Hindi and English. There applications will later become a part of the social networking site.

There are two categories in the contest – Facebook Apps and Facebook Connect Integrations. The contest opened on July 2 and will be open till September 11. Anyone above the age of 16 residing in India and also having a valid Facebook account is eligible to take part in the contest. Originality of the concept, market potential and social aspects of the application are few of the criteria for winner selection.Prizes for the contest is said to be $4000, $2000 and $1000 in each of the two categories.

You can also check out the contest details and official contest rules.

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New Changes on Twitter

Alagappan — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:33:10 +0000

Regular users of Twitter might have noticed quite a few changes being rolled out by Twitter regularly. Here is a list of a few changes done recently and might be helpful for newbies.

Follower and Following Page Improvements

When you visit your Follower of Following page, you can notice a few improvements which makes it much easier for users to manage the followers and also take some action like to send a reply or send a DM. There are two views available namely, the compact list and the expanded list. The ‘expanded’ list also shows the location of the tweep and the last tweet.

Hourly API Call Limits Increased

The hourly API call limits which was restricted to 100 is now said to be increased to 150. It is indeed a great news for those who use Third Party Apps to access twitter. It is also helpful for Twitter App developers.

Hashtag Hyperlinked

Twitter has started hyperlinking Hashtags. Hashtags as many regular twitter users know, is a tool used to organize your tweets. Appending a tweet with a hashtag makes it easier to find that topic in search. A few of the frequently used Hashtags these days are #FollowFriday and #IranElection. Now with the hyperlinking of Hashtags search and organising becomes even more easier.

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Twitter Connect

Alagappan — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 20:57:20 +0000

Twitter Connect is a feature which would let third party services to allow you to use your Twitter ID as a Log In ID much like how Digg.com uses Facebook Connect. Going by Twitter’s exponential growth, this would be the right thing to do. Such a feature would be useful as it lets a visitor to use his Twitter Account instead of going through the rigorous process of creating a new profile.

This would let you tweet about whatever you are doing on the site. Twitter has quite a firece competition from Facebook, which also has a quite a lot of features. So why would one choose twitter over facebook? One reason is the simplicity which twitter offers. When compared with Facebook, Twitter is very simple and it is one of the prime reasons for its huge growth.

Twitter lacks behind a lot in terms of the number of users and that might be the only disadvantage now as developeres might opt for the service with a greater number of users.

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Public Status Updates on Facebook

Alagappan — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 21:34:07 +0000

Facebook has announced that it is testing a new option using which users can choose who can see their updates and posts. This facility though is still in testing stage, it is expected to be released for general use quite soon.Right now, it is available only to those who had earlier set their status updates and privacy setting to be visible to everyone.

Now it would be easy for Facebook users to post updates which is not just visible to their friends but also to the entire world. It provides the option to choose between Everyone, Friends, Friends of Friends, Friends and Network or Custom (where you can selectively choose your friends).

Twitter, the popular micro-blogging site is famous primarily because of its updates visible to everyone and this new step taken by Facebook is obviously aimed at Twitter. The main advantage which facebook now has is the per-item privacy control which twitter lacks. If a user wishes to post a public update like an interesting link or comments about a movie, he can do it in the public domain and if it is personal information he can choose it to be private.

It must be noted that facebook recently released an option using which users can select their own vanity urls. This would help Facebook a lot in Google search results.

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Twitterbar

Alagappan — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 02:46:39 +0000

Firefox Add-on

Twitterbar is a Firefox extension which allows you to post to twitter from Firefox Browser’s address bar. It enables you to post to twitter very easily. Though it doesn’t have the functionality to get tweets and display it is a great toolfor posting twitter updates.

Posting to Twitter

You can type your 140 character message in the address bar and then you can either type ‘–post’ or click on the twitter icon to post it to twitter. If you wish to tweet the URL of the page you are viewing then you can just click on the twitter icon and it gets posted along with a small message which you can edit in the settings of the add-on.

Real Time Search

This add-on comes with the ability to search in real time. You just type in your query and type ‘–search’ and you get OneRiot’s real time search results in your browser.

You can download the Twitterbar add-on for Firefox. You can visit the Official Homepage of Twitterbar if you have any doubts or queries.

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Gravity Master

Alagappan — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 03:12:32 +0000

It is a free flash game which enables you to play with what is called crayon physics.It enables the user to create shapes and lines with a mouse each of which would have some mass and everything is subject to the laws of gravity.It is surely an interesting game for those who love basic physics involving shapes.

The goal of the game is to vollect all rotating circles with the black ball. You can move the ball by drawing shapes with mouse. The ways of completing a level is only limited by your imagination. It consists of 24 levels of varying difficulty.

You can play the game at its official website. It is also available in various other sites.

If you are unable to find out the way to complete a level there are two videos (this and this) available in Youtube which would guide you in completing that.

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